Michel Gondry: the mad scientist of cinema

Michel Gondry: 'I would have been an inventor.But I didn’t have the background. Plus, the plane and the car had already been invented'

Steven Daly

12:01AM GMT 27 Jan 2008

Michel Gondry's surreal videos for Björk and The White Stripes were ground-breaking. His films, too, are innovative. but don't, whatever you do, call his work 'quirky'. 'I have a duty to make something different,' the director tells Steven Daly. Portrait by Rick Giles

Back when Michel Gondry was a mere maker of pop videos - as opposed to a world-renowned writer-director of feature films - his fans knew that each of his new works would deliver a bold pop-art statement of baffling origin. Among Gondry's most memorable visual coups was rendering The White Stripes as Lego figures for their song Fell in Love With a Girl.

Then there was Let Forever Be, a 'Revolver'-esque single by The Chemical Brothers for which Gondry meticulously sustained a stream of dazzling trompe l'oeil trickery that updated the pre-digital magic of the 1930s Hollywood musical for the 21st century. In The White Stripes' The Hardest Button to Button, every pounding beat moved drummer Meg White farther along the street at the head of an expanding procession of red drum kits. Gondry's place in the pop-culture pantheon was sealed when the gimmick was parodied on The Simpsons.

While Gondry's impressive aptitude for the Shock of the Nouveau might suggest the influence of illegal substances, the 44-year-old Frenchman denies any such notion - on the grounds of practicality, if nothing else. 'Maybe you can come up with ideas on drugs, but to execute them is something else entirely,' he says. 'I think it's easy to have nice ideas, but it's something else to make them exist in the real world.'

The one project on which Gondry did seek to impose a drug-specific ambience was the promo clip he made for The Rolling Stones' barrel-scraping version of Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone. Gondry grilled one of his more hedonistic acquaintances about the precise visual experience of an acid trip; his interpretation of this data led to the development of the 'bullet-camera' technique, which became part of modern cinema's lingua franca when it was appropriated for the Matrix films.

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Gondry has become one of the most visually innovative directors working today, thanks to a unique and inventive style that manages to be simultaneously childlike and sophisticated. The director achieves his iris-searing visual effects largely by imposing technical parameters on the methods he uses - for instance, he insists on using improvised hand-made effects instead of CGI, the digital-effects arsenal that most of his contemporaries depend on. 'It's impressive in the beginning,' says Gondry of slick CGI trickery. 'But after a while it loses its impact. And there's no sense of commitment there.'

While this lanky, dishevelled character may have the appearance of a superannuated skate-punk/slacker, Gondry could never be accused of lacking commitment. Tim Maurice-Jones, a director of photography who has worked with Gondry several times, has said that he can be hard to work with. 'He has this vision in his head of exactly how he wants things to look,' says Maurice-Jones. 'Unless you come up with a very good reason why he should change things, he'll have it his way.'

One of the most anticipated films at this year's Sundance Festival was Be Kind Rewind, directed by Gondry and starring America's favourite cuddly curmudgeon, Jack Black. Be Kind Rewind is the third film written and directed by Gondry, a New York exile who made his auteur debut with 2006's whimsical The Science of Sleep. After building his reputation as the creator of stunning music videos (and advertisements), Gondry first gained renown in Hollywood through his collaborations with Charlie Kaufman, the revered screenwriter of the convoluted, absurdist hit Being John Malkovich. Their first effort together, 2001's anthropological romp Human Nature, was a critical and commercial let-down, but in 2003 the pair were vindicated when they shared a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for the dazzling metaphysical love story Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which made an impressive $72 million worldwide and coaxed a moving performance from Jim Carrey.

Kaufman has said that Gondry is 'very meticulous, very kind of scientific in his approach' to his work, and indeed the Frenchman dreamt of a career in science when he was growing up in Versailles. 'I would have been an inventor,' says Gondry, whose grandfather created several electronic instruments. 'But I didn't have the background. Plus, the plane and the car had already been invented.' As if we needed any more proof that Gondry is the 'mad scientist' of cinema, last year he was invited to spend a few weeks tinkering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as its 'artist in residence'. Indeed, the MIT bathroom pass he was allowed to keep remains one of his proudest possessions.

As a 17-year-old, Gondry, an adept painter, briefly attended art school before his lackadaisical attitude got him kicked out. 'I was a dreamer, to say the least,' he says. Redemption came a few years later in the form of a 16mm Bolex camera. 'It seemed the perfect crossover for the skills I already had.' Gondry proceeded to build small sets for his own animation projects. 'I thought, that's exactly what I can be good at. It was a nice epiphany.'

He put his animation skills to good use when he made a series of low-budget videos for the jovial French new wave band Oui Oui, for whom he also happened to play drums. When it became obvious that he would fare better as a video-maker than a skin-beater, he began directing promos for other acts. (He has since played drums for, among other people, Kanye West.) As a video director, Gondry quickly gained a reputation for a 'quirky' style - much to his chagrin. 'There's a rejection of "quirkiness",' says Gondry. 'It's journalists using an insidiously dismissive vocabulary - it's dangerous to think this way. People try to impose conformity, but there's a duty for a creative person to make something different. Sometimes to be tagged as "quirky" is a bit dangerous.'

It's certainly true that writing off all Gondry's work as merely quirky represents a reductive dismissal of one of the most imaginative figures of the current pop era. For instance, the one video that established him as a distinguished lensman was Björk's 1993 video Human Behaviour, a lycergic fairy-tale starring a menacing teddy bear, which warped the collective consciousness of the MTV generation.

While experimenting with all his outré ideas and hand-knitted special effects on pop videos, Gondry was keenly aware that he was, in effect, getting free training for bigger things. 'You're playing with other people's money,' he says. 'It's always a bet. The way I work, you can't just fix it in post-production.'When it was time for him to make the step up to feature films, with the Charlie Kaufman collaboration Human Nature, quirkiness was the least of the criticisms levelled at the pair. The film fared badly at the box office and was dismissed as 'self-indulgent', another pejorative term with which Gondry takes issue.

'I get irritated that people don't get it, they don't understand,' he says. 'They think they are smarter. "It's selfish to do a film like that!" But for them it's not selfish when someone makes a movie just for the money.' Gondry and Kaufman went on to score a financial success with their next outing, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; but then he found himself faced with a new kind of problem. The consensus in Hollywood had him pegged as Kaufman's geeky Gallic sidekick, rather than an artist in his own right. 'When you collaborate with a strong person, it can make things harder,' says Gondry. 'You have to go on and make something that will make people forget what came before.'

His first post-Kaufman project was The Science of Sleep, a surreal romantic idyll that drew some of the harshest criticism of his career. One British reviewer quipped that the film 'might go down well at, say, a convention of retarded Parisian performance artists'. Gondry has become inured to such insults, pointing out that in terms of worldwide box office, The Science of Sleep earned many times its budget. He is also honest enough to admit that he maintains the safety net of being able to direct a couple of music videos and top-dollar television advertisements between each movie project.

For a man who accompanied a DVD collection of his music videos with an autobiographical film entitled I've Been 12 Forever, Gondry has a surprisingly mature take on the brutal realities of the film industry. 'You'd better have either box office or reviews,' he says. 'The main goal for a director is to do the next movie. Other rewards, they really don't matter; they're just part of a self-congratulatory system.' The latter opinion would be borne out by the fact that Gondry's Eternal Sunshine Oscar resides atop the refrigerator of the New York apartment he shares with his 16-year-old son, Paul.

Be Kind Rewind stars Jack Black and Mos Def as two hapless clerks in a 1985-style video store (no DVDs allowed) owned by Danny Glover and located in Passaic, an impoverished New Jersey town that the director imbues with the crime-free ambience of a 1950s suburb. Customers start showing up at the store with rented tapes full of nothing but static, and demanding refunds. As a result of a bizarre series of events, Black has demagnetised the entire inventory. Hilarity ensues. Or at least it would if Gondry hadn't relinquished control of the film's tone and let it drift into some whimsical - if not downright quirky - netherworld in which any semblance of narrative cohesion gives way to childlike flights of fancy.

The story of Be Kind Rewind centres on Black and Mos Def attempting to save Danny Glover's imperilled business by quickly and cheaply coming up with short Hollywood remakes that become a local sensation. 'The film was easy to pitch,' says Gondry. 'Just a couple of sentences.'

Among the elements that Gondry uses to fill out the time when Mos Def and Jack Black aren't remaking Ghostbusters and Robocop and Driving Miss Daisy with cardboard props and clunky Beta-cams are Mia Farrow as a wacky, suspicious yet liberal old neighbour-lady; Danny Glover's questionable claim that the jazz great Fats Waller was born in the video store; and - gasp - a group of evil town planners who want to demolish Glover's humble enterprise to make way for a yuppie housing development.

It's impossible to tell whether the film will be reviled or embraced upon its release, and by whom. At the very least, Gondry's new film should become an instant classic with the stoner crowd; and it could even become a firm favourite among the much larger demographic that was born after the demise of the VHS tape.

'Kids seem to like it,' Gondry says. 'You have a natural creativity when you're younger.' As to the ultimate aesthetic verdict, the director cares not a whit. 'Is it good or bad? It doesn't matter. It's important to me - that's beyond the quality of the film.'

Be Kind Rewind ends with a collective feel-good scene so saccharine that cinema owners might be advised to stock up on insulin. Although the scene suggests some steroidal version of Frank Capra, Gondry had another role model in mind. 'I like Capra, but he's very conservative,' he says. 'But I prefer Vittorio De Sica; he's warmer, he's on the side of poor people.' Gondry employed members of New Jersey's poor as actors on Be Kind Rewind, and he was impressed with their contribution - at least, initially. 'They brought life to the place, which was great,' he says. But when filming stopped, the director returned to New York with a sour taste in his mouth. 'Some of them got the idea that they wanted to be film stars. When they're dancing to Fats Waller, they're so dynamic and committed. Unfortunately, some of them get the wrong message. It's so imprinted on everybody's mind - it's the only dream they can have. I try to tell them, "Don't go there. Do your own thing."'

One of the sub-plots of Be Kind Rewind is based around a Hollywood lawyer, played by Sigourney Weaver, who uses copyright law to justify shutting down our heroes' cute little movie-remaking operation. In a climate of internet movie piracy, many creative types spout fashionable and hypocritical platitudes about how all art should be free, but Gondry is not among them. 'I'm not against copyright,' he says. 'I think people should be allowed to make a living from what they create. What I'm against is the lack of choice in entertainment, where one film takes $76 million in one weekend.'

According to Gondry, Be Kind Rewind was inspired by 'an old utopian concept I had: people creating their own entertainment'. He frequently posts short films on YouTube. His debut on the site, in which he appeared to solve a Rubik's Cube with his feet, prompted a feverish debate on how he did it (by rolling the film backwards, it turns out), and at the time of writing he is acting as YouTube's 'guest editor'. But he suspects that the site's freedoms will be curtailed after a corporate buy-out.

Gondry's ideal would be for people to 'make movies without distribution or production - I want to pursue this idea. We'll create a workshop where you can write and film a story on a backlot. After two hours, they watch it and they go.'

This unusual notion occurred to him in the 1980s, when he arrived in Paris to see independent cinemas being swallowed up by multiplex chains. 'I had the idea of creating clubs in cities where they can make movies and say anything they want,' he says. 'It would be great to have a community of people, local people, homeless people or whatever, who could all shoot their own films; then everyone could pay some small price to watch them. It's not a gimmick. It's a philosophical concept. I've never had the opportunity to try it. It's an improbable social concept, but it could become a reality.'

While it's impossible to doubt Gondry's sincerity when he posits Be Kind Rewind as a manifesto for democratic art, unfortunately the film works better as an argument for cultural elitism. And, once again Gondry is likely to be subjected to the torture of critics and their 'insidiously dismissive' accusations of unacceptable quirkiness.